For Chesapeake Oysters, Future May Lie in Past

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

Published: August 2, 1999

PORTSMOUTH, Va.—
The oyster scientist stepped out of the boat into the western branch of the Elizabeth River, seeming to defy nature and stand on the water itself.

''This is profound,'' said Robert D. Brumbaugh, a fisheries specialist, standing on the barely visible tip of what scientists say is a critical turning point in the beleaguered life of the once supreme Chesapeake Bay oyster: an oyster reef laboriously created by an armada of scientists and hundreds of citizen volunteers.

''It's been so long since oyster reefs have been hazards to navigation here,'' Mr. Brumbaugh said, proudly noting the ''Danger: oyster reef'' sign rising from the murky water sloshing over the tip of the reef at low tide.

The sign stands as far more than a throwback to the 19th century, when vast Chesapeake oyster reefs rose up fruitful as orchards toward the thousands of watermen who used to harvest their succulent treasure from skipjack sailboats. In fact, the reef warning is pointing firmly to the future.

''The return of oysters to Chesapeake Bay would probably be the greatest signal that we really are heading in the right direction,'' said William C. Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a watchdog group of scientists and citizens that has worked with state governments for 30 years to repair and protect the bay. The foundation has worked toward a tenfold increase in the oyster population by 2005, using volunteers and the reef approach that is gathering momentum.

A new consensus report by the bay's principal scientists, after years of life-support experimentation on the oyster, has recommended an all-out commitment to three-dimensional reef construction -- not mere flat-bottom beds -- as the key to restoring the oyster to its central place in the life of the bay.

The agreement marks a moment of rare optimism about the tattered health of the oyster and, by extension, the bay itself, a vast resource of 64,000 square miles with a watershed population of 15 million people across six states. The Chesapeake Bay at one time was one of the most prolific oyster regions in the world. The oyster is a keystone species that had prodigiously filtered away impurities in the pristine heyday of the bay while propagating upward like coral reefs as magnets for other creatures.

''For the first time, we have a technical consensus across state lines,'' said Dr. Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The report was produced by 10 marine scientists from Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, led by Dr. Gene Burreson of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

The basic problem is that in the last four decades, gross overfishing and two protozoan diseases have devastated the oyster population to about 1 percent of that of its glory years of a century ago. The scientists concluded that 10 percent of the bay's historically best oyster grounds must be set aside for the creation of permanent reef sanctuaries.

''Verticality is critical,'' the scientists of the Chesapeake Research Consortium concluded, embracing the once-radical notion that oyster restoration must be built on a return to the three-dimensional reefs the first colonists found towering hazardously up from the bay floor. Many of the old reefs were lost over the years through dredging.

That formation has been reaffirmed as the oysters' preferred structure in reproducing by means of free-floating larvae that attach to the existing mass of oyster shells and grow, fixed in place to the reef. High-rise experimental beds have been found to teem like apartment complexes as rich habitats for hundreds of interdependent creatures, including a more secure breed of oyster.

A century ago, more than 20 million bushels of oysters were harvested annually from the bay. Five years ago, the take was fewer than 100,000 bushels and has rebounded only marginally while scientists have pursued long-term solutions.

Seventeenth-century ship logs and sketches of the bay's old reefs have been consulted in building the score of new reefs dotting the bay. Up to an acre each, they rise up to 12 feet above the floor sediment and cost up to $100,000 each. By far the most ambitious step -- building a ring of 10 one-acre reefs plus surrounding fields of shucked oyster shells 10 inches deep -- is to begin next year in the lower Rappahannock River, once an oyster mother lode that has gone fallow.

For all the shifting problems of the bay -- chronic river fishkills like the enormous one in late July from drought and toxic pfiesteria microbes, dangerous runoffs of sediment and nutrients from the region's farms and lawns -- there are positive new signs like the pelicans that have migrated to swoop about the bay. But the two crucial elements to the bay's health remain the oyster and underwater grasses, Mr. Baker said. An estimated 88 percent of grass acreage has been lost this century in various abuses of the bay. This loss is increasingly a threat to the crab population that has overtaken the oyster as the bay's main commercial harvest.

''If enough oysters can clear the water once more, the sunlight may penetrate and nurture the grasses and reoxygenate the water,'' Mr. Baker said. He summarized a cycle pinned to encouraging experiments with artificial reefs stocked with hatchery-produced, disease-resistant oysters.

The oysters are set in place by thousands of citizen ''gardeners'' -- including concerned boat owners and teams of schoolchildren -- who nurture young oysters at home and dockside and transplant them by hand to the reefs. The new reefs have been built atop vast piles of old oyster shells. The results include a remarkable improvement in reproduction rates as oysters mass upward and propagate outward for miles beyond the initial reef, said James A. Wesson, chief of conservation replenishment for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

''There's a public relations strategy in showing the reefs at low tide,'' Mr. Wesson said, noting that the reefs could have been built to remain out of sight. ''This way, the kids can see and touch the oysters right in place. They call themselves grandparents. Planting trees, they'd wait 20 years for the fun they get here in a year of tending to the oyster offspring.''

In his own act of bay adaptation, Mr. Wesson obtained a doctorate in marine wildlife after seeing his early career as a waterman in the long tradition of his family evaporate in bedeviling environmental problems and plummeting harvests.

Now he works on the cutting edge of the oyster restoration, overseeing 20 of the reefs and an annual budget of $300,000. Next year Mr. Wesson expects a fivefold increase in budget, most of it from the state, as he begins the Rappahannock's ring of reefs.

''The Rappahannock is so big we're taking it in sections,'' Mr. Wesson said, looking forward to the next big test in restoration. ''It used to be the river oyster,'' he said, noting that it took six years of experimenting with smaller reefs to approach the challenge of the Rappahannock.

''We're on the right track,'' he said, watching a boatload of schoolteachers moving past the hazard sign to witness the growing promise of the Chesapeake. ''We're on the point of showing what we can do.''

Photos: Artificial reefs, like these on a branch of the Elizabeth River, are the foundation of a plan to restore the oyster population of Chesapeake Bay. Oysters filter impurities from the water, a process that scientists say would help clean Chesapeake Bay. Marine scientists examined a reef. (Photographs by Paul Hosefros/The New York Times) Map of Virgina and Maryland highlighting location of Chesapeake Bay: Oyster reefs were built in the Elizabeth River off Chesapeake Bay.